Call fire station directly to save time: Plea from official who fought DA Block blaze
Telegraph | 22 February 2025
Do not call 101. Call your neighbouring fire station on its landline number instead. That is the plea being sent out to the populace at large from the firemen at Bidhannagar fire station that responded to the rescue call after a fire broke out in a three-storeyed house in DA Block on Monday night, that killed Debarshi Ganguly, a 47-year-old resident.
“Save the local fire station’s landline number on your cellphone to save precious time. People of Salt Lake can reach us at 23575293. Also specify clearly whether it is a residential building or a petrol pump or a warehouse, storing what kind of products, that has caught fire as we need to decide whether to take out a fire tender with foam or water,” said Sanjib Chakraborty, the station officer of the Bidhannagar fire station in Sector V.
Puloma Sen, who lives behind the house, told The Telegraph Salt Lake that she had dialed 101 on noticing the blaze. “But it connected to the fire station in Chandernagore! I begged them for the Salt Lake fire department’s contact but the numbers they gave did not work. So I called 100 (the police emergency number) which promised to inform the Sector V fire station,” she said.
Chakraborty explained to The Telegraph Salt Lake that a call to 101 could reach any of the 170 or so fire stations. “The information is then relayed to our headquarters which decides the jurisdiction of the call, which in this case is North Barrackpore, our district headquarters. They, in turn, would alert us,” he explained.
On Monday night, it was a call from the police control room that sent them on the way. “The call from our headquarters came after I had left,” he said.
The other requirement is a clearly pronounced address. Fire minister and local MLA Sujit Bose, who visited the spot, said a misunderstanding about the address had caused “a slight delay” in the arrival of the fire tender as they heard the fire was in BA Block. The firemen insist that the delay at the PNB crossing due to the confusion was a maximum of five minutes.
How it happened
According to officials, the victim’s wife told them that she was preparing their five-year-old child for her mathematics examination on Tuesday while her husband was enjoying a smoke and a drink in the bedroom. She came down from the second to the first floor and was feeding the child around 9.30pm when she noticed an orange glow in the tree next to the house. Realising the source of the light was upstairs, she ran up and on opening the door, she saw a fire blazing in the bedroom. She brought a blanket from downstairs and tried to save her husband. But by then, there was a lot of smoke and she could not do much other than rushing downstairs and raising an alarm.
“I had sat down for dinner when I heard a woman shriek. I looked out and saw the second floor next door on fire. Glass from their windows was exploding and falling on our garage too,” said Saswati Mukherjee, a neighbour. “I immediately called the fire brigade, cops, and electricity office to deactivate the main line of their house.”
By then, three residents of the flaming building – Nivedita Ganguly, her mother-in-law and five-year-old daughter – had managed to come down but the man of the house, Debarshi Ganguly, was still stuck on the top floor.
Officials from the electricity office and the police arrived. “The cops climbed to our terrace and tried to douse the flames by pouring water from the top. But they had no fire-fighting equipment,” said Mukherjee.
The walls of Sen’s house too were getting heated up. “Fearing the worst, we took all important documents to our car and drove it out,” said Sen. The fire tender, she claimed, took 40 minutes to come. “Though I had specified that the house was in DA – Delhi Assam – Block, multiple neighbours had been dialling the fire department and in the confusion, the tenders landed up in BA Block first and wasted precious minutes.”
The fire fighters say the blaze must have already been huge by the time they were called. “We received a call from the police control room at 10.15pm and we reached in 10 minutes. Two fire tenders were sent. There was a lot of wooden furniture in the drawing cum dining room which led to the bedroom. A flammable false ceiling, which seemed to be under construction, was falling down in smouldering pieces. The floor has an area of about 1,200 sq ft. It took us around five minutes to arrest the fire and another 10 minutes to extinguish the blaze,” said Chakraborty.
It was only after tackling the fire in the drawing room that the firemen could enter the bedroom. “We found a charred body,” the fire services officer added.
The aftermath
A forensic investigation took place at the site of the fire on Tuesday night and the report is awaited. There is no electricity in the house now.
The tyre shop on the ground floor is struggling to do business without power. “We have spoken to the electricity office, but they say that they need an NOC from the local police station before they can restore power,” says the owner. “We can’t imagine how the family is now living upstairs without electricity.”
The staff pointed at a mobile generator on a lorry parked outside the house. “This is providing power only for the water pump. That is all they have got permission for. They have got halogen lamps installed on treetops to provide some illumination indoors,” he said.